Taylor Swift Has No Regrets

The record-setting pop star opens up to her bestie Tavi Gevinson aboutmatters of the head, heart, and everything in between.

Who better to get to the heart of the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift than one of her besties? For ELLE's June Women in Music Issue cover story, Tavi Gevinson sat down with Swift to talk about matters of the head, heart, and everything in between. Pick up the June issue on newsstands nationwide on May 19 to read the entire interview. Below, check out a sneak peek of their conversation.

Since the age of 14, I have littered—excuse me, adorned—the Internet with Taylor Swift analyses. I was first struck by how much more agency she had over her songwriting and public image than other popular artists tapping into my demo, and by how it felt to get permission from a girl wielding a guitar to shamelessly express one's emotions, despite how often doing so can get you called "crazy" (that sexist euphemism for "feminine"). With the release of her fourth album, Red, in 2012 and a handful of highly publicized romances, Taylor was criticized by the press and other entertainers for such sinful acts as dating people and writing songs about it, gaining a reputation as boy-crazy and love-ridden. But I'd always felt that the men in her songs were mere catalysts for her own self-discovery. Last October she released 1989, and if you use the Internet or ever leave the house, you're familiar with its ubiquity. But I would like to draw attention to the secret message spelled out in the liner notes of "Clean," the final track: "She lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything."

Taylor's first four albums have been certified platinum a combined 21 times, but despite her unprecedented success in country music, 1989 is strictly pop. The same woman who once landed a nonsingle called "Forever and Always" on the Top 40 charts now declares, in "Wildest Dreams," "Nothing lasts forever." Yet her storytelling and the attention to detail that she honed in country are what make her pop songs peerless. She's 25 now, and with her newfound perspective on romance's expiration date, she's also gained appreciation for the joy of a fling's impermanence, recovering from heartbreak, and reinventing oneself. "Find out what you want/Be that girl for a month" refers to the preferences of a lover in "Blank Space" but could just as well apply to her own evolution. 1989 debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 charts and sold almost 1.3 million copies in the first week. It was the top-selling album of 2014 and outsold her previous two albums in the U.S. after just 19 weeks in release.

Taylor and I first met in 2012, but you can't go over to a friend's apartment to make chili and be like, "But first, real quick: Is it 'Starbucks lovers'?" However, in the name of journalism, I talked to Taylor the morning of this year's Grammys at her house in L.A. about all of the above.

Tavi Gevinson: I want to ask you about "Clean." The girl singing is so sensible, with none of the impulsiveness of "Blank Space" or "Style."

Taylor Swift: "Shake It Off" and "Clean" were the last two things we wrote for the record, so it shows you where I ended up mentally. "Clean" I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London. Someone I used to date—it hit me that I'd been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn't thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, Oh, I hope he's doing well. And nothing else. And you know how it is when you're going through heartbreak. A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It's this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it. Then time passes, and the more you live your life and create new habits, you get used to not having a text message every morning saying, "Hello, beautiful. Good morning." You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was. You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day and planning fun dinner parties and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you're in London and you realize you've been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you're fine. And you hope he's fine. The first thought that came to my mind was, I'm finally clean. I'd been in this media hailstorm of people having a very misconstrued perception of who I was. There were really insensitive jokes being made at awards shows by hosts; there were snarky headlines in the press—"Taylor Goes Through a Breakup: Well, That Was Swift!"—focusing on all the wrong things.

On happily ever after and what Lena Dunham has taught her about love:

TG: Can you tell me more about how the way you go about songwriting has changed?

TS: I'd never been in a relationship when I wrote my first couple of albums, so these were all projections of what I thought they might be like. They were based on movies and books and songs and literature that tell us that a relationship is the most magical thing that can ever happen to you. And then once I fell in love, or thought I was in love, and then experienced disappointment or it just not working out a few times, I realized there's this idea of happily ever after which in real life doesn't happen. There's no riding off into the sunset, because the camera always keeps rolling in real life. It's magical if you ask anyone who has ever fallen in love—it's the greatest. Now I have more of a grasp on the fact that when you're in a state of infatuation and you think everything that person does is perfect, it then—if you're lucky—morphs into a real relationship when you see that that person is not in fact perfect, but you still want to see them every day.

TG: That's why I love that the height of your song "You Are in Love" is the lyric: "You're my best friend." That's the best.

TS: Yeah. I've never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena [Dunham] has told me about her and Jack [Antonoff]. That's just basically stuff she's told me. And I think that that kind of relationship—God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful—would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.

TG: …I think that when people who've had success from a young age go through a train-wreck cycle, it's usually because they're working on someone else's terms, so they feel the need to rebel. But when it's something you've built, you don't have that same kind of resentment or angstiness. But it's also difficult to keep those standards for yourself. Do you ever really worry that you're going to accidentally say something inflammatory?

TS: Not necessarily. As far as the need to rebel against the idea of you, or the image of you: Like, I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this. And so I'm not going to sit there and say, "Oh, I wish I hadn't had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17; I wish I hadn't gone through that fairy-tale phase where I just wanted to wear princess dresses to awards shows every single time." Because I made those choices. I did that. It was part of me growing up. It wasn't some committee going, "You know what Taylor needs to be this year?" And so with 1989, I feel like we gave the entire metaphorical house I built a complete renovation and it made me love the house even more—but still keeping the foundation of what I've always been.

Michael Thompson

For the full interview, pick up ELLE's June issue, on national newsstands May 19.

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